Exceptionally Uncaught

I would have posted this to Randlings, except I'm pretty sure I heard Gordon say Randlings was down at the moment. And, of course, the only people who'd notice an update to Randlings are those with aggregators, and it's probably a safe bet to say all of them are subscribed to Exceptionally Uncaught...

The ideas been around of a little while, but I actually started writing some sample apps for the webservice this week. At the moment I've got two (well, two and a half, but no one will be seeing the half until it's a whole). Both are pretty basic, but I'm reasonably pleased with them.

The first was for Straughn, who wanted something simple he could point at a webservice somewhere and have it do something. A nice demo for the sales people. So the licenser will go off and report back what parts of TRIM you currently have licensed on the server. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually work on Straughn's machine yet (although it's worked on everyone else's).

The second was for Chris. He was very unimpressed that he couldn't find out the names of the various input properties easily, so I whipped him up the Listinator. You give it an object type, and you get back a list of all the input properties, complete with type and readonly status.

The thing I like about both these apps is that you can specify the webservice and the user. Tony had written his own version of the Listinator, but it wasn't doing Chris any good because the webservice it was pointing to wasn't running anymore.

The half-finished app is something Stilly's been suggesting for a while. It's designed to periodically notify you about things in your In Tray. The idea is to run it on SPERMs, so you won't suddenly discover you'd had 8 SPRs for the last two weeks. So far I've got it sending me emails with a list of records, but hopefully by the end of tomorrow I'll have a version that will work for multiple users, adds any SPRs to your task list in Outlook, removes them when you're done, sends you an email when a new SPR is raised, and each day (or something) sends you a list of what you've got left (all nicely formatted to bring attention to the oldest ones).

If anyone can think of any improvements to what I've got, or any suggestions about other little samples that would be useful, come and have a chat. If you want to have a play, the licenser and the Listinator are both sitting in my Simon's Stuff/Webservice Demos (you'll have to copy them out of my shared directory before you run them).